Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (62 page)

But by this time, the Poor People's Army was running out of steam, out of creativity, out of cash. People were referring to the campaign as the Little Bighorn of the civil rights movement. Now Abernathy was desperately trying to pull out of Washington with his dignity intact.

At some moment during that long, wet, turbulent month, an era had reached its denouement. The battle-fatigued nation had just about had its fill of protest politics, of marching and rioting, of scattershot airings of grievance. As Gerald McKnight put it in his classic study,
The Last Crusade
, most of Washington had come to regard Resurrection City as "some grotesque soap opera
⁶⁹³
whose run could not end soon enough."

The civil rights movement was feeling the final impact of King's assassination, the final measure of his loss. By carrying out their slain leader's wishes in Washington, the SCLC staff had shown the world just how indispensable he was. Though the event still had several weeks to play itself out, Resurrection City had become, in McKnight's words, "almost a perfect failure."
⁶⁹⁴

Yet there was also something fiercely apt about Resurrection City and its inability to move the nation. Ramsey Clark, perhaps alone among high-ranking Johnson administration officials, responded to the pathos embedded in King's final flawed experiment on the Mall. "Lincoln smiled kindly,
⁶⁹⁵
but the American people saw too much of the truth," Clark wrote a few years later. "For poverty is miserable. It is ugly, disorganized, rowdy, sick, uneducated, violent, afflicted with crime. Poverty demeans human dignity. The demanding tone, the inarticulateness, the implied violence deeply offended us. We didn't want to see it on our sacred monumental grounds. We wanted it out of sight and out of mind."

45
A BANK WITHDRAWAL

DURING THE MIDDLE of May, the focal point in the hunt for James Earl Ray shifted north to Canada. The FBI learned that Ray had spent time in Toronto and Montreal shortly after his escape from the Missouri penitentiary--that, in fact, he had developed his Eric Galt alias in Canada, stealing identification details from a
real
Eric S. Galt, who lived in a Toronto suburb. On the theory that he might have returned to Canada after the assassination, the FBI asked the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to pursue a variety of labor-intensive leads. Foremost among these, the bureau wanted Canadian authorities to examine all passport applications dating back to April 1967, the month of Ray's escape from Jeff City, and then single out any photos that bore a resemblance to Ray.

It was an immense undertaking: during that time, Canada had issued some 218,000 passports and had renewed 46,000 more. Reviewing this mountain of paperwork would require staggering man-hours--all the document and photo comparisons would have to be done by hand and by eyeball. But the Mounties took up the task with urgency and zest.

Superintendent Charles J. Sweeney,
⁶⁹⁶
commander of the RCMP criminal investigating squad in eastern Ontario, assumed command of the task force in Ottawa. Sweeney selected twelve uniformed constables and equipped them with magnifying glasses. Night after night, working high up in a government building one block from Parliament, the Mounties painstakingly went through the applications, one by one.

THAT SAME WEEK, Ramon Sneyd was staying in a cheap hotel called the Heathfield House, on Cromwell Road, a major thoroughfare that cuts through West London. The Heathfield House was in Earls Court, a low-rent neighborhood then known as Kangaroo Valley because it was especially popular among Australian workers. Sneyd had been here for ten days, holed up in his room, reading newspapers and magazines--and desperately trying to hatch a new plan. He still had
Psycho-Cybernetics
and other self-help books to help him while away the hours, as well as a book on Rhodesia and a detective novel,
The Ninth Directive
. Lying low from dawn until late at night, reading in his small wallpapered room, he could hear the frequent roar of the big Heathrow jumbo jets as they banked over the Thames, offering the promise of freedom in the extremities of the faded empire.

Doris Catherine Westwood,
⁶⁹⁷
the proprietress of the Heathfield House, hardly ever saw her tenant and wasn't quite sure of his name. "Owing to his bad writing," she later told Scotland Yard, "I thought his name was 'Snezel.'"

May 1968 was a vibrant time to be in groovy, bell-bottom London. The musical
Hair
was about to open at the Shaftesbury Theatre--though censors vowed to ban the show's frontal nudity. In the history of rock 'n' roll super-bands, it was a month of ferment. The same week that Sneyd arrived in London, the Beatles, having returned from a Transcendental Meditation sojourn in Rishikesh, India, buried themselves in Abbey Road Studios to begin recording what would become known as
The White Album
. Elsewhere the Rolling Stones were just wrapping up one of their greatest contributions to vinyl,
Beggars Banquet
, and The Who's Pete Townshend had begun writing the first strains of a rock opera about a deaf, dumb, and blind kid named Tommy.

Trapped in his room, racked with stomach pains and headaches, Sneyd had neither time nor inclination to enjoy the city, and he caught little of London's vibe. Since arriving here, Sneyd had become a lizard-like creature, keeping to the cracks and shadows. He was extremely reluctant to show his face in public during the day. American newspapers and magazines on sale at London newsstands were carrying his photo with some regularity.
Life
magazine had come out with a long cover story on Ray's childhood and criminal career. Sneyd bought a copy of it--"The Accused Killer: Ray, Alias Galt, the Revealing Story of a Mean Kid," the cover said--and he read the story with a feeling of deepening dread that Hoover's men would soon follow his trail across the Atlantic.

Luckily for Sneyd, Great Britain had recently passed the Criminal Justice Act, which, among other things, virtually prohibited British publications from printing anything but the most rudimentary facts about a suspect before trial. Consequently, the London papers had not yet published photographs of Ray, and scarcely anyone in London other than a few Scotland Yard officers knew of the FBI warrant for his arrest. And in truth, although King's assassination had made huge headlines in Great Britain, most English citizens referred to the slain civil rights leader as "Luther King" and had only a vague idea of what, besides winning a Nobel Peace Prize for civil rights, he had actually done. Unlike in the United States, King's death, and the manhunt for his killer, had largely receded into the background.

For all these reasons, Sneyd remained under the radar screen, well hidden among the warrens of London's more than five thousand inns and bed-and-breakfast establishments.

But his troubles were mounting. He'd had no luck finding a cheap passage to Africa. Since his arrival here on May 17, Sneyd's money woes had become truly acute. He now had less than fifty pounds on his person. On May 27, when Mrs. Westwood told him it would soon be time to pay the rent, Sneyd knew he would have to do something desperate, something rash. "I'll go to my bank," he promised her, "and make a withdrawal."

A FEW HOURS later, sixty-two-year-old Maurice Isaacs and his wife,
⁶⁹⁸
Billie, were getting ready to close up their small jewelry store in Paddington. The shop, which had been operating since the end of World War II, was located at 131 Praed Street, only a few blocks from Paddington Station, in a neighborhood bustling with commuters, transients, and tourists.

The gray-haired husband and wife were showing diamond rings to a customer when Ramon Sneyd walked in. In his pocket was his loaded snub-nosed Liberty Chief .38 revolver. He lingered by the glass cases in the front, pretending to be shopping for something. Eventually, the customer left, and Sneyd made his move. He grabbed Maurice Isaacs, brandished the revolver, and stuck it in the side of the jeweler's neck.

"This is a stickup!" Sneyd said. "Now both of you get on back there!" He gestured manically toward the darkened rear of the store, where the couple kept their office.

Over the years, the Isaacses' shop had been burglarized, but they'd never been held up at gunpoint. The couple kept no weapons in their store, nor had they ever rehearsed a plan for how to handle such a situation. Neither of them moved an inch toward the back as Sneyd had commanded--they were determined to take their chances out in the open, where someone on the busy street might see them through the plate-glass window. They knew there was a crowded pub just down the street--the Fountains Abbey--and the sidewalks outside were thronged with rush-hour foot traffic.

Instinct took over. Billie Isaacs, a sweet and matronly woman in her late fifties, leaped onto Sneyd's back. When she did, Maurice wrestled free from Sneyd's grip. He turned and struck the would-be robber several times, then set off the alarm.

Realizing he'd seriously underestimated the tenacity of these shop owners, Sneyd turned and darted from the store. In the early evening light, he raced down busy Praed Street, past St. Mary's Hospital--frustrated that, after his sorry performance, he was none the richer.

IN OTTAWA, AFTER a week of exacting work, the team of twelve constables had plowed their way through more than a hundred thousand passport applications--and had singled out eleven as "possibles." But each of these "possibles" led detectives to the valid passports of legitimate Canadian citizens. As everyone feared, this was shaping up to be a pointless fishing expedition.

But on June 1, a twenty-one-year-old constable named Robert Wood
⁶⁹⁹
lingered over a certain photograph. He eyed it with his magnifying glass, saw the dimple in the chin, the touch of gray at the temples, the slightly protruding left ear. He compared it carefully with the numerous Ray photos he had as a reference. "This could be him," Wood said out loud, "if he wore glasses." The name on the passport was Ramon George Sneya.

Now Constable Wood's colleagues set aside their work and gathered round to examine the photo. Some saw the likeness; others weren't so sure. The horn-rimmed eyeglasses threw them off, as did the nose, which was sharper at the tip than that in the old Ray photos. This man looked considerably more dignified in his sport coat and tie, almost like an academic.